this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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ewwww, a paywall.
other people have made good suggestions as well but I use Bypass Paywalls Clean as a Firefox add-on and it works great
Journalists need to be paid. Ad revenue is in freefall, and it never really supported long form content that doesn't endorse a product. If you want real news, it has to be paid for somehow.
You need to learn to jump over the wall https://archive.is/2025.03.12-190857/https://www.theverge.com/reviews/627056/bee-review-ai-wearable
I don't think writers should be paid either. We have AI to do all writing now anyway, so what do we need writecels for anyway? 😏
That's not the responsibility of the end user. That's the responsibility of the host. If you're going to have people write your articles, pay them.
And how does the host pay for them?
Tons of ways, the most common is ads and partner affiliates.
As someone else mentioned, ads are becoming less profitable. Particularly in light of the whole data collection biz, I'm starting to regard paywalls as a more "honest" type of monetisation. In a perfect world, they wouldn't need to do either, and maybe there are better options, but I don't fault them for it.
That's a fair opinion. I could never imagine contracting someone to put content on my website, then making my end users pay to even see that content just so I can ensure I can pay my writers, knowing it drives most traffic away. An ethical and intelligent website host would ensure more consistent and effective ways of bringing in income, which is their responsibility.
We live in a digital age where most of everything on the internet is free. Putting your site behind a paywall is a surefire way to ensure your website will receive less traffic in this day and age, but to each to their own.
A Firefox fork like IronFox with an aggressive adblocker setup like uBlock Origin in medium mode blocks paywalls and all kinds of annoying popups on most sites. Takes a bit of tweaking to not break some sites, but after that it's amazing.